Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday January 11, 2011 @07:36AM
from the barrels-of-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."

With Donkey Kong, it's not about reflexes but rather the opposite: anticipating, so you don't run yourself into a situation you can't get out of, and pixel/frame precision, so you jump at exactly the right time and spot.For high score chasing, judicious use of the powerup is also rather important, and this has to be planned, not done by reflex.

I'm personally not too impressed with Donkey Kong, Frogger and Pac Man scores, cause it's mostly repetitive action.I'm much more impressed with masters of Defender, which requires reflexes, precision steering, and being able to handle a boatload of buttons. It's fiendishly difficult in its simplicity.

Have you ever tried playing Robotron? Just two joysticks in place of the boatload of buttons and the levels are randomly generated. The sheer number of enemies you have to handle at once (while collecting people for points to keep you alive) makes for one of the most intense old-school arcades out there. My current MAME obsession.

Wow --- blast from the past. I remember playing with a friend of mine in 9th grade at a local pizza joint. We each got good enough to roll it (I think that was level > 255) and play all day on a quarter each. That was really the way to do it since we got a break after each of us died. What a rush that game was.

In GTA Chinatown Wars, Mission #33 Dragon-Haul-Z is of this ilk. It seems designed to fry the nerves of adrenalin phreaques with a one-two punch. Most of the pixelbangers complaining about it seem to be 12-year-olds. That'll teach 'em to play a game rated 17+ before they're able to see the joke, let alone get it. If you're not sure who is and who isn't, read the T. "I'm so cool God is my fangirl" doesn't cut it.

Everything I've read about "The King of Kong" indicates that it's more fiction than fact.

I've heard "victims" make the same complaints, that it was a hacked up character assassination of Billy Mitchell and his cronies. Then I watched the supposed unbiased documentary "Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade" and found out that, yes, in fact Billy Mitchell is a twat.

I think its a shame that he was omitted from "The King of Kong" movie. Wiebe took Hanks score and there wasn't so much of a mention of Hank. He's a good guy and Im happy for him.
Also it there a theoretical maximum score for donkey kong? Just wondering what the asymptote is.

Well there is a theoretical limit because of the time limit per board and the kill screen, but figuring it out would be very hard (and achieving it practically impossible). It would first involve figuring out the optimum strategy assuming that the various enemies behaved in certain ways - e.g. the fireballs on the pie factory all respawning and immediately heading towards you while you have the mallet, the fireballs and blue barrels all being worth 800 points, etc, etc.

But the odds of this happening are probably on a par with winning the lottery many times over. If the PRNG decides a blue barrel is worth 300 then that's 500 points lost and nothing the player can do about it. And the optimum strategy for a theoretical perfect game is probably very different to the optimum strategy for a typical game.

Oh God, you're right. That makes it even harder to calculate an optimum strategy. Maybe you're better off pausing for a fraction of a second and getting 300 for one fireball, so that you get higher points for that 8 barrel sequence that will reach you a few levels later (for those who don't know, the PRNG in dkong is really just the system clock). So there is still a theoretical highest-possible score (obviously, as you can't achieve an infinite score), but you'd have to be insane to figure out what it was

I don't think that's right. With millisecond resolution (which is the resolution of the clock, but the input event loop will be much slower no doubt) you could pick any one second, and then have 3^1000 combinations of either moving left, moving right, or doing nothing for each tick in that second. As I say, the actual input response will be far slower, but even if it's 1/10th of a second, you only need a few seconds to get an astronomical number. Playing every possible game is entirely unfeasible. You c

Suppose the game used a 10Hz tick (it's probablly faster) and at each tick there were 4 possible combinations inputs (there are probablly more). In 3 hours that's 4^36000 = 2^720 > 10^216 (2^10 > 10^3) possible combinations of inputs.opps sorry those are the figures for one hour. still makes the point though.

This is where the risk/reward idea alluded to in the article comes into play. There are play strategies that will maximize your score on average, but are slightly more dangerous. Let's say these work 10% of the time, increasing your score by 20%, and the other 90% of the time they crash and burn. Almost all of the time, this a losing approach. The more conservative player will avoid these, because it means almost all of your games are useless. But eventually, someone playing with that aggressive style

I don't think there is a possible absolute perfect score, since score depends on number of barrels you jump and barrels you smash with the hammer, but at the same time, the bonus score (earned at the end of the level) is decreased as time goes by, so you can't keep jumping barrels to earn score. (it turns out to be increasingly difficult too)

And thus we prove that any civilisation with both bread and circuses is pretty much over. They should build that into Civ VI but it might be a bit TOO much realism - "three people in your empire are playing Donkey Kong excessively, you have three rounds to stamp it out or lose the game".

Good illustration. That's 34,000 man-years. 34,000 men for a year, or one man for 34,000 years (i.e. about 500 lifetimes). The pyramids didn't need that. The Apollo missions probably didn't need that. Most of modern physics and mathematics could have been discovered in that (it's like Archimedes still being alive and just as productive right through to the current day, and still only one-sixteenth of the way of the way through his useful working life).

To put it in context, though, going to the toilet takes much more time than that, per person, over the course of a single life (so multiplied by 6 billion, it's quite a lot of total "wasted man-hours"). We waste inordinate amounts of time doing silly things that aren't strictly necessary, too. Productivity can only be measured on a personal level, not a numerical one. Was Alexander Fleming productive enough (or incited enough productivity in others through his discoveries) even if he was also an accomplished glass-blower? (And that actually helped him make further discoveries in unrelated fields). How do you measure something like that? And how much do we waste in actual wars? I bet it's orders-of-magnitude more, given the budget allocated to it (and thus the tax etc. used to generate it, and the work used to generate that, etc. etc. etc.).

Adding it up, it's a waste of time that could theoretically be used doing better things. On a personal level? Fuck off, I want to play Counterstrike sometimes to rest and actually have a life, not be a machine. Both points of view are equally valid. Neither will ever change except in small details. And posting on Slashdot to complain about it, like the OP did, is probably the *greatest* hypocrisy ever. Let's take five minutes to hit buttons to send a comment over thousands of km of copper and infrastructure so that lots of other people can ignore it and nobody ever benefit from it.

That's 34,000 man-years. 34,000 men for a year, or one man for 34,000 years (i.e. about 500 lifetimes). The pyramids didn't need that.

I'm sorry, you're flat-out wrong. The pyramids took more than 34 thousand man-years to build.

According to Herodotus, the Great Pyramid took 20 years to build and required the labor of 100,000 men. At just 8 hours a day that's 58,440 man-years, but the "builders" probably worked much longer days...

Note: That's just ONE pyramid, not "the pyramids," which would imply all of them.

1) That's accurate (i.e. an Ancient Greek who could judge accurately how many separate people were involved on a 20 year Egyptian project 1500 years before his time without exaggeration)2) The builder's ALL worked an 8 hour day, every single day, even religious festivals (and there wasn't, say, one man who knew how to do the bottom bits and then slunk off, or only lifted one stone before breaking his back, etc.) during the night, etc. on hard heavy-labour, as did every architect, pr

Actually if you look at the total personal budget for the life time of the Apollo missions it actually take considerably more time than 34,000 man years. First you take the actual NASA teams which included the mission staff, engineers, astronauts, support personnel and backup teams. Next you include all of the personnel needed to design, manufacture, transport and assemble all of the equipment. Lastly you have all of the military and recovery personnel.

Uh... bread and circuses was not the reason Rome fell, just one of many reasons.

And I think you quite miss the point of the effect of "bread and circuses" contributing to the fall of Rome. It was because millions [archive.org] in taxpayer money were being spent on bread and circuses (like a form of dole) for the non-working poor, and this had economic effects (obviously) when combined with other factors.

All these expenditures had to be recovered from the taxpayer. To compound the difficulties, there was an adverse balance of trade. Roman currency, for example, poured into India and the East to pay for luxuries. Even in the time of Nero, Seneca estimated that it cost Rome five million dollars a year to import its luxuries from the East. In a word, though seemingly prosperous, in the second century AD the Roman empire was overspending to such an extent that it was moving to an economic crisis. When in 167 AD Marcus Aurelius was faced by the attack of the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi, he was forced to sell, is it were, the crown jewels as well as the household furnishing of his palace to finance the war.

When the US government starts spending millions of taxpayer money on Donkey Kong contests, then we can worry about it the role old computer games have on the destruction of modern civilization.

The only thing you could say here, really, is that this may be a symptom of overall decay, not a reason.

For a start, it a right-wing paradise of sorts, in that the Senatorial class -- which was non-elected and hereditary by now in the Empire times that you mention -- paid no taxes, although they owned most of the land. Although many also set up merchant enterprises in the name of their freedmen, with them owning most "shares" so to speak and taking most profits... and again paying no tax whatsoever for that either.

As the rich quickly gobbled up more and more of the former free men's farms, essentially more and more of the Roman economy didn't contribute a cent any more to the state.

I would say that the spending of private coins to import stuff from the East was a much more minor factor than the fact that none of those coins would go into taxes anyway.

Imperial Rome almost at no point actually had a sustainable economy per se. It was a robber economy, simply put. They _had_ to keep expanding and plundering new countries, even to keep paying their legions.

Heck, they plundered even their own citizens, as essentially they paid all the wages in overvalued silver coins and demanded the taxes only in gold.

You are correct. Many of the long-term senators who never seem to lose an election have their own companies and fail to pay their taxes. I would like to cite examples from both parties, but unfortunately it seems that only Democrats have been implicated recently.

Imperial Rome almost at no point actually had a sustainable economy per se. It was a robber economy, simply put. They _had_ to keep expanding and plundering new countries, even to keep paying their legions.

Isn't this the same of almost every currency that has been put into existence? We keep have to repaying the always inflating currency debt by exponentially expanding our economy.

Well, sorta, but not exactly. The Roman Empire didn't have to expand its economy per se, it had to keep attacking more countries to plunder them. Trajan needed the gold of Dacia to pay for his war in Persia, and so on. When they ran out of places to plunder, the collapse started. Then came a devaluing of coinage of EPIC proportions, attempts at price fixing, enlistment dropped like a rock because the soldiers' wage and "pension" (so to speak) became worth almost nothing, etc.

The Roman Empire didn't have to expand its economy per se, it had to keep attacking more countries to plunder them.

I can't really see the difference. It had to keep on expanding, either through growth or plunder. How is it any different than, for example, the British Opium Wars with China, the Nixon Shock, the huge debts the United States is racking up with China, or if I'm really cynical, war with Iraq to keep oil trading in American dollars?

What about "inheritance tax"? IIRC starting with either Tiberius or Caligula the senatorial class had to leave a substantial part of their estate to the emperor or have their will declared invalid and the entire estate seized.

I wouldn't call the 5% inheritance tax of Augustus to be all that substantial, actually, and certainly didn't even put a dent in the Latifundia. And hardly did much to balance the military expenses. In fact it barely almost covered the discharge bonus (think: pension) of soldiers who m

That sounds fair. Rich people create all of the jobs. Why should the job creators be punished by paying taxes?

Well, that is, if you count slavery as "creating jobs". Those latifundia (great estates) were worked almost exclusively with slaves who not only had no freedom and could be crucified on a whim (even freedmen could be reverted to slaves and crucified on a whim, btw), but were often fed bare subsistence ratios or even less than that. There are documented cases where slaves were basically left to forag

Sod contests for old games. We have popularity contests beamed to your own personal section of the planet so you can judge people remotely using buttons without having to get out of the chair. We have people who've never touched soil eating nutritional balanced, rich, processed food every single day. We have people who spend most of their time tapping buttons to post ignored opinions on global virtual messageboards that nobody ever reads again.

There are any number of ways of not being productive. The better we are at doing things like growing food and producing things that save time, the more time we have to deliberately do nothing at all. 100 years ago, nobody had TIME to spend 8 hours a day updating their friends about what they did that day, even if those friends lived in the same house.

People doing nothing is actually a sign of how easy it is to stay alive with modern equipment and infrastructure and how little knowledge is required to survive in that atmosphere (I have absolutely no idea/experience about how to grow enough food to feed my family... do you?).

That said, I do think that this is hardly "news" even for a geek. So the guy got a new highscore in an old game. Good for him. And he probably spent months dreaming about the damn game, destroying his muscles and turning his mind to mush in order to achieve that "fame". That's his problem. In my entire life, I can't imagine it ever taking more than a second to acknowledge, even if I *was* interested in the exact area we're discussing. But yet I can afford five minutes to say what a waste of time it is. Modern life, eh? Truly wonderful.:-)

Sorry to break your bullshit bubble, but Rome had its first gladiatorial combats in 310 BC, according to Livy, and yes often accompanied to distributing food to the poor. Not only it wasn't the beginning of the end, but it was followed by its most rapid expansion centuries. In the couple of centuries after those, Rome went from being a debatable leader of a leader of city states spanning barely half of Italy to an empire sprawled all around the Mediterranean, not to mention most of modern France and half of Britain.

If anything, historians from the era tend to agree that sponsoring lavish shows to boost morale actually served well to do just that, and helped Rome rebound after such massive defeats as Canae and emerge more powerful than ever before.

It would be more than 500 years after that, or still almost three centuries even after the peak of the popularity of gladiatorial combats in the 1st century BC, that Rome even started to decline. And almost 800 years after that, in 476 AD that the Western Empire fell.

Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org] fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?

So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.

Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org] fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?

So, like, if the Superbowl in the US gets canceled, they are going to Hell in a handbasket?

So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.

This is Slashdot. We don't read, we just post. Read history? Hell, most of us don't even bother to read the article summaries.

I hope that you can appreciate that I merely joking . . . but maybe not.

So, like, if the Superbowl in the US gets canceled, they are going to Hell in a handbasket?

It's certainly more supportable than the opposite "OMG, we're going to hell because some people have fun" theory. Though still in a fallacious way.

But mostly it just shows that if you just hand-pick a pair of events connected only by chronology, you can argue just about anything. E.g., Rome expanded the quickest after they introduced crucifixion (learned from the Carthaginians actually, with the cross-bar being a Roman twist) and imploded the fastest after Constantine abolished crucifixion. So, hmm, maybe that's the real key to building a successful empire;)

This is Slashdot. We don't read, we just post. Read history? Hell, most of us don't even bother to read the article summaries.

I'm ok with that too, actually, but then really I expect such people to not use pseudo-history for their canned moralizing points.

Sorry to break your bullshit bubble, but Rome had its first gladiatorial combats in 310 BC

At least according to the historical consultant on "Rome" (which I'm watching on DVD, and is set around 44 BC, since it shows the murder of Julius Caesar), there were gladatorial combats, but nothing like what people nowadays imagine until much later. That is, the Coloseum was later. Earlier ones were much smaller, and one shown on the show was small and held in an area built on the forum. (They do describe the di

Well, buying and training slaves for it was expensive too, so, yes, usually the shows didn't involve whole armies. But larger ones existed too. E.g., since you mention Caesar, he wanted to sponsor a show with so many gladiator pairs that the Senate forced him to reduce it, because it boiled down to a small army of armed men in Rome.

So reality TV, Sarah Palin, American Idol and Fox News are all perfectly fine... but a guy playing Donkey Kong is the end of civilization?

Sure, video games are pointless time wasters, the opium of the people... as oppose to commenting on slashdot, which as we all know, is the last bastion of resistance preventing the downfall of the western world.

Contrary to popular belief, primitive people have plenty of free time and don't spend all day hunting animals and running away from animals. They just don't have awesome games like Donkey Kong to fill their time. They have to do boring stuff like sing songs and make babies.

Funny, most historical texts that I've read suggest the real reason that Rome fell was the rampant homosexuality and hedonism.

Then I suggest you read actual history books, rather than the ones put out by Southern Baptist seminaries. Homosexuality and hedonism were common in Rome long before Rome fell. The main causes were (1) vast amounts of wealth in very few hands, (2) constant military aggression, and (3) corruption of various types.

Of course, like you, the Romans wanted to blame something else on their downfall. So, they blamed Christians, much the same way you blame homosexuals, liberals, and anyone else you don't like.

I'm wondering when the time will come, when some guys start writing AI to defeat the game with optimal high-score. Even if a coin-op is required, the robot parts to handle input shouldn't be that difficult to program, and would make the whole thing even fancier. Screw chess, arcade AI solvers sound immensely more fun!

Part of it is already really based on random chance. Since there is a kill screen and the way certain events occur is (somewhat) random, the person with the highest score usually is the one that just got lucky a few more times than the runner up. At the level he, Wiebe, and Mitchell are at, I doubt there is really much of a "skill" difference between them.

Part of it is already really based on random chance. Since there is a kill screen and the way certain events occur is (somewhat) random, the person with the highest score usually is the one that just got lucky a few more times than the runner up. At the level he, Wiebe, and Mitchell are at, I doubt there is really much of a "skill" difference between them.

They should all get together for a match of Smash Bros. Chien can play Mario, Wiebe can play Donkey Kong, and Mitchell can play Kirby and spend the whole match hiding in a corner mashing the "taunt" button.

From watching King of Kong I learned that it has a killscreen (a level that is impossible to beat). Based on that, I've assumed that there is therefore a theoretical maximum score in Donkey Kong.

There are a lot of variables affecting how many points can be scored on each level (bonus timer, how many of Pauline's trinkets Mario picks up, how many hazards he jumps or hammers, etc.) so this isn't as easy to calculate as the maximum possible score in Pac Man is.

Does anyone know what the highest possible score on DK is, or have a rough estimate for how close this new record is to that score?

I've partly answered this in a previous comment, but as an illustration of how much higher the score can go, take a look at level 1-1 (the first barrel round). In Wiebe's highest scoring game, he scored ~8000 points on that level. Twingalaxies opened a track for who could get the highest score on that level, and although the site is slashdotted, from memory it was well in excess of 12000. The barrel rounds are by far the most common in the game so that suggests a huge margin for improvement.

Of course, the 1-1 barrel round is quite different from the 5-1 barrel round. In the latter the timer counts down far faster, so there's less time to points press. On the other hand, you have far more control over the barrels, which makes higher scoring easier (if you ignore that whole 'death' thing).

If I had to make a guess, I'd say there's theoretically hundreds of thousands more points to score. Maybe even break 2 million if the game cooperates?

Why is Google fooling around with Soduku when they could be figuring out the maximum score on Donkey Kong? C'mon Google, put your brainpower to something important! Google engineering, consider yourself challenged.

Lives with his brother in Manhattan [vgchartz.com], so presumably single. If you live someplace as nice as a NYC apartment, go ahead and cast those stores. Used to live there myself, and everybody I know who has a nice place there doesn't say LOL; not placing my bet on you so far.